In our fifth episode we speak to our first ever guest Brian Moon, ancient PHP elder of dealnews and someone who has probably forgotten more about PHP than our two hosts will ever know. [...] In this episode we talk about dealnews, how they use PHP (and how they also use it in some interesting ways), and his thoughts on issues like concurrency and evented systems. We also cover features of PHP that allowed for some major changes and approaches they used in the code base for the site.

Other technologies discussed include Gearman, Node.js, Squid and Varnish. You can listen to this latest episode either via the in-page player or by downloading the mp3 directly.

n my session, I talked about the history of Phorum. One of the things I covered was the early days of PHP. Back in the 90s, before PHP, most dynamic web work was done in C or Perl. At that time, in those worlds, you had to do all the HTTP work yourself. [...] PHP changed all that. You had a default content type of text/html. You had automatic handling of request variables. Cookies were easily ingested and output. You could template your HTML with script instead of having to write everything out via print or stdout. It was amazing. Who could ask for more?

He talks about frameworks as a tool, but not one that everyone really needs. For quite a few sites, they can be overkill and time spent implementing them could be used for other things. For those that want to use them, there's lots of flavors to pick from, but he reminds you to be mindful of performance trade-offs. He mentions the commoditization of frameworks and how frameworks, like it or not, are everywhere (even if it's just lightweight custom code you threw together for a prototype).

Keith Casey, Cal Evans and Brian Moon talk about how dealnews.com handles DevOps and manages 10-15 code rolls a day. (yes, a day!)

You can either listen to this latest episode via the in-page player or, of you're more on-the-go, you can download the mp3 and listen at your leisure.

Brian was kind enough to review both of his presentations which go in to great detail about the scaling issues he's faced both with DealNews.com and the Phorum forum software project (which recently turned 10 years old!) [...] Thanks to Brian for going over things in such detail!

You can download this latest episode from the WebDevRadio site as well as check out Brian's slides from his MySQL conference presentation.